Megyn Kelly questioned Wednesday whether “pedophile” was really the right word for a man who “liked 15-year-old girls.”The Megyn Kelly Show/YouTube
Megyn Kelly is known for coming up with absurd takes that no one asked for.
There was his insistence that Santa Claus was white, for example, and his assertion that wearing blackface wasn’t so bad (it got him fired from NBC News). On her eponymous SiriusXM show on Wednesday, Kelly chose another hill to die on: She suggested, during a conversation with NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon, that it wasn’t entirely fair to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile because he was “in the barely legal category” of minors — which Kelly appallingly defines as “like 15-year-olds” — who look as if they could be legal adults. Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, and the Justice Department said he abused and exploited dozens of minor girls, some as young as 14.
But Kelly said she nonetheless wonders how to characterize Epstein because, she asserts, she knows “someone very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything,” and “this person told me from the beginning, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, from his point of view, was not a pedophile.”
Kelly continued: “It’s the perspective of this person, who was there for a lot of this, but was the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15 year old girls. And I realize that’s disgusting. I’m certainly not trying to make an excuse for that. I’m just giving you the facts, which is that he didn’t like 8 year old girls. But he liked very young teenage types who could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.
Kelly said his anonymous source’s characterization – that Epstein was “not a pedophile” – “is what I believed… until we heard from [Attorney General] Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged… child sexual abuse material on his computer and for the first time I thought, “Oh, no, he was a real pedophile.” I mean, only a pedophile gets off on videos of young children being abused. [Bondi has] I never clarified it, I don’t know if it’s true. I have to be honest, I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s word on the Epstein affairs anymore.
“Or anything else,” Ungar-Sargon added.
“Yeah,” Kelly responded, “so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we haven’t yet seen anyone come forward and say, ‘I was eight, I was under 10, I was under 14, when I first came into his jurisdiction.’ It can be said that it is a distinction without a difference.
“No, it is not,” said Ungar-Sargon.
“I think there’s a difference,” Kelly continues, “there’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”
Actually, we don’t know.
The comments read like a change for Kelly. In 2023, she attacked Republicans who defended British comedian and right-wing darling Russell Brand against allegations of rape by three adult women and a minor. (Brand was charged with five counts of rape and assault in the UK earlier this year and has pleaded not guilty. He has denied the allegations.)
“You are 31 years old and you had sex for three months with a 16 year old? Kelly spoke about the allegation against Brand by the minor. “It’s over. I’m unsubscribing. And I’m sick of conservatives online trying to defend this as if she had a role in this. She was a minor. Just because you can’t be prosecuted for this doesn’t make it right.”
Kelly also exposed grooming by convicted pedophiles, like former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle, whose victims were said to have ranged in age from 6 to 17. And she condemned what she called “the exploitative and predatory nature of the entertainment industry toward minors.” (Kelly also, of course, used the term “grooming” in a baseless, homophobic and transphobic way, as many right-wingers do, to describe activities like drag – which do not constitute grooming at all.)
Epstein’s victims described the abuse they suffered as having derailed their lives, despite the fact that they were, according to Kelly, “very young teenagers” as opposed to five-year-olds. Take Marina Lacerda, a Brazilian immigrant who, as I wrote in September, described how abuse affected her upbringing during a press conference on Capitol Hill in September:
Lacerda said she came into Epstein’s orbit while working three jobs to support her mother and sister as a high school student, and a friend offered her $300 to give a massage to a man, presumably Epstein. “It went from a dream job,” she said, “to the worst nightmare.”
Lacerda said she began being called to Epstein’s house so often that she dropped out of ninth grade and never returned. Her only escape, she said, came when Epstein told her she had become too old to work for him.
Kelly’s comments came the same day the House Oversight Committee released an additional 20,000 pages of documents, provided by Epstein’s estate, including emails in which Epstein called President Donald Trump “the dog that didn’t bark” and said he “knew the girls when he asked.” [co-conspirator] Ghislane [Maxwell] stop,” as my colleague Inae Oh wrote. (White House officials claimed the emails actually proved Trump’s innocence and called them a “distraction” from the government shutdown.)
In a statement provided to Mother JonesElisa Batista, campaign director at UltraViolet Action, an advocacy group against sexual abuse, called Kelly’s comments “reckless and irresponsible.”
“Jeffrey Epstein is a pedophile. Period,” Batista said. “A middle-aged man grooming and sexually exploiting 15-year-old girls constitutes child abuse. Period.”
Lawyers for several of Epstein’s victims did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday afternoon.
